1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to a method for manufacturing a printed end product, in particular, journals, brochures or books, produced of one printed product or of several printed products, collected astraddle and sequentially supplied, and bound by stitching.
2. Description of the Related Art
Such methods are performed with so-called gather stitchers as described, for example, in “Industrielle Buchbinderei” (Industrial Book Binding), verlag Beruf+Schule, 1997, pp. 176-186.
The different printed products are supplied by several feeders, which are arranged along a collecting path, on parallel supply sections to a collecting device arranged upstream of the stitching apparatus. These gather stitchers receive the printed products from stacks or other storage devices.
For an economical processing of printed products with gathers stitchers, a high number of printed end products is necessary, i.e., the required number of printed end products determines the method to be employed. For example, currently, the general rule is still applied that up to a number of 2000 prints of the same printed end product a digital printing method is more economical in comparison to offset printing because this requires significantly shorter set-up times and, for a corresponding number of prints, an average processing time of approximately eight hours.